


Menoetius

by keithyourpal



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Abandonment, Anal Sex, Clones, Day 4: Slave, Identity Issues, Kuron Week 2018, Kuron is Ryou (Voltron), M/M, Mental Coercion, Psychic Bond, Psychic Violence, Rough Sex, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-07-07 01:50:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15898467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keithyourpal/pseuds/keithyourpal
Summary: MENOETIUS: perhaps the Titan god of rash action and violent rage, and brother of AtlasHaggar gathers the surviving clones to aid her in locating and subjugating the hidden Altean colony. Meanwhile on Earth, Shiro begins to have strange, violent dreams.





	1. Chapter 1

_Who gave you so much faith?_  
_Who gave you so much power?_  
_You turned it all against me_  


  
  


The witch found him long after he crashed, when all that remained of his pod was a twisted, half-melted wreck of metal and the draining remnants of the fluid that gave him artificial life.

He saw--felt--what she had done to the other clones she found before him. Most of the holding pods burned up in the atmosphere long before they could crash across the surface of the planet, incinerating his brothers who were never given a chance to wake up, still slumbering in the cold, serous solution of druidic energy. 

They were more fortunate than the dozens who did reach the planet, only to be mangled and torn apart in the crash along with their pods. He remembered their pain, multiplied over a dozen times, as he lay in suspended half-consciousness. All he could do was wait helplessly as the fluid drained through the cracked hull of his own pod, able to think and feel, yet not move from his stasis.

Until the witch and her sentries came. She stopped by each wrecked pod to evaluate which of the surviving clones could be salvaged and which to put down, ending their short miserable lives with a blast of power from her clawed hand. A clone with half his body crushed, his tank full of blood. Another with both his legs broken, the bones shattered. One whose chest was punctured by debris. Countless others who met the same fate. 

He saw her approach through the eyes of the survivors as they were freed from their pods, saw her wrinkled face and cruel eyes as she assessed him over and over and over. He could see her through the eyes of the few clones she spared, following behind her in silence. And he could see what the clones yet to be found could, some waiting in the darkness, some dying slowly.

As he lay there, half-submerged in the druidic energy and his own blood, feeling the dry dust of the planet begin to fill his lungs, he could feel the intermittent deaths of yet another brother, many of them confused, some of them scared, all of them worthless fakes.

Only he was angry.

In time, the cracked front of his pod was wrenched away by two of his brothers. One had his left arm ripped off in the crash, the bloody shoulder cauterized by the witch’s magic. The other one’s face and upper body were disfigured by burns, with rivulets of violet bioluminescence pulsating in the blackened skin. There was a pinprick of the violet energy in the center of his left pupil as he reached out a hand and pulled his brother from the pod.

“Stand up,” the witch said as the two clones dropped him on his knees. He coughed, feeling the thick mucosal liquid inside his lungs and stomach, polluting every one of his cells with her power. His aching, broken body obeyed, rising up to uncertain legs to face its master as she tilted her head and inspected him, occasionally reaching out to touch an arm or his back, inspecting the cuts in his pod suit. He felt a freezing flash of pain every time her magic made contact with a wound.

She touched his face, and burned his ruined left eye, dragging her thumb up through the lacerated flesh to his hairline. The pain was a sudden, overwhelming shock that was gone in a tick, leaving him with only the sickening memory of what the injury felt like.

His brain struggled to process the onslaught of information from so many of his brothers, simultaneous and immediate, all of their pains and fears. And within the storm of sensory information he found the proverbial eye, the only one of his brothers who was not destroyed or left to certain death in the free fall or in the crash to the planet below the witch’s facility.

The infiltrator. Not the first one of them to be deployed against the paladins of Voltron, but the first one to actually reach the paladins and be accepted as the true Shiro. Wherever he had gone now was calm and free of pain, free of Haggar. He would have thought the infiltrator was dead, except he could tell the difference. He knew the infiltrator was still, somehow, alive.

“You’ll do,” the witch said, bringing him back to focus. She pulled her hood tighter around her face and moved on, heading to the next pod some fifty meters away. She did not seem to care about ordering any of them about. He felt the pull to obey her instinctively. Glancing to a large reflective pool on the ground by his pod, he could see the dots of violet in his own eyes.

He looked like the rest of the clones, with the obvious exception of the infiltrator, who the witch’s men must have altered to look as close to the real Shiro was possible. He had black unspoiled hair, no scar across his nose but with a jagged one that cut through his scalp and curved down through his blinded left eye, reaching almost to the corner of his mouth. The witch’s magic left a distinctive mark, the tendrils of violet energy and the burning point in the center of his remaining eye.

“We need to move,” one of the other clones, the one with the burned face, said to him.

“I know,” he responded. He knew that their voices would be identical and was still surprised to hear it. He followed his brothers. Including him, there were almost thirty survivors Haggar whom deemed fit enough for her purposes, whatever they may be. From the memories he had of the infiltrator’s failure, he could only guess.  



	2. Chapter 2

After Haggar examined or disposed of all the surviving clones her sentries could find, there were almost forty of them remaining. Once gathered, she took them to her ship. There she began to fashion a larger ship with her magic, using the broken clone containment pods and other wreckage from the facility. 

She worked for hours, kneeling on a large diagram drawn in the packed dirt with her own blood. She worked alone. Her twenty-odd sentries fanned out around the clones, their guns held at the ready should one of them break free of control while the witch’s attentions were focused elsewhere.

The clone sat on a large rock several paces away and watched the sphere of magic expand and restrict around her. His body itched with the innate desire to heed her command, even when she did not speak a word or ask any of them for help through their mental link. There was nothing any of them could do to help her. None of them had yet been given a druidic arm, and from what he could guess of her situation, now none of them ever would.

That power was a gift afforded only to the infiltrator after he was awoken from his pod and subjected to a series of tests. The clone knew this by probing through their collective memories, until his connection to the infiltrator suddenly broke off. The loss was perturbing only because the infiltrator had the most knowledge of any of them, and was their only link to the real Shiro’s memories now that the real Shiro was dead. With both of them gone, the remaining clones had only their nascent memories of the crash to draw upon.

He could remember a little of what it felt like to be the infiltrator, and even less of what it felt like to be the real Shiro. He could not remember Earth at all, or how their progenitor came to be under the Galra Empire’s rule. All he knew were bits of pieces of what came after--the gladiator ring, the fight with the Red Paladin. Try as he might, he could not recall the Red Paladin’s face, but he felt the pain of their fight and the crash rise to the surface just thinking of him, and put the paladin from his mind.

Over the next few doboshes Haggar’s new ship began to take shape. This planet was desolate and barren; there was no point in trying to forage or hunt until the witch’s new ship could take flight. He doubted the sentries would let any of them leave even if they desired to.

Suddenly, the giant scrap of metal crashed back to the ground, and the thrum of the witch’s energy cut out. She collapsed. Her dusty robes gathered underneath her as she dug her bloodied palms into her long hair.

“My son is dead.”

She stayed there for a quarter of a quintant, then rose up with dark crackle of energy that gathered around her like a coming storm.

  


  


\-----

  


It was not their place to question the witch. He knew what it was like to be curious, to be afraid of the unknown. What it was like to think and feel like the real Shiro. He was capable of being cognizant that the real Shiro would try to fight back against her control, as the infiltrator had done on the bridge of the Castle of Lions before the witch’s power completely overwhelmed him.

The other clones were of the same mind--except for a few. Glancing around the hold of the witch’s ship, it was impossible to discern which clones were responsible for the thoughts of fleeing or rebelling present at the fringes of their collective thoughts. He could feel their scheming sting at the back of his mind like the bite of an insect. But they knew how to conceal themselves, and being identical made tracking them down impossible just by looking.

If the witch was aware of the resistance, she took no action. When they boarded she took two clones and five sentries to the bridge, and left the clones under the watch of the remaining sentries. A sentry pointed its gun, guiding them to the decontamination chamber. In groups of ten they were stripped and washed, then given fresh podsuits.

“Number 00201,” the sentry said as it held out his clothes. Instinctively, the clone turned over his right wrist and saw for the first time saw the Galra digits marked along his inner wrist, etched into his skin like the burn from the witch’s magic along the side of his face.

When all the clones were decontaminated, the sentries took them to a bay of the ship lined with holding pods. He stepped back into his assigned pod. As the druidic solution began to fill the pod and submerge him, he was gripped by a flashback of the fall, of waking up trapped and in pain. As he opened his mouth the cold fluid rushed in, filling his lungs and silencing his scream.

  
\-----  


  


Clone 00201 returned to consciousness slowly. The thin sense of self that distinguished him from their collective mind could not mitigate the rush of memories from the clones who stayed with Haggar on the bridge. He found that two years had passed, and rather than return to the splintering empire, the witch was still continuing on her lonesome journey. Where she was going, she never said.

As the pod drained he reached out, curious, and found that the infiltrator was still missing, and yet still not dead. As his brothers woke from stasis, he could feel them reach out and draw the same conclusion, including the clones who were trying to resist Haggar’s control.

A sentry stood in front of his pod and kept watch as the front of his pod dematerialized allowing him to step out unsteadily and fall in line with the other clones. He squinted as they filed out into blinding white light. The heavy thud of their boots echoed on a metallic floor, but as his eyes adjusted he saw what he had never seen before: a great green forest, stretching as far as the horizon. A wide river cut across the landscape in the distance. Colorful flowers he could not smell spotted here and there in the grass, blowing in a breeze he could not feel.

Ahead of him, Clone 00198 reached down to pluck a yellow flower and his hands passed through air, revealing nothing but a hologram. Was it all fake, then? Yet as they marched in line, the texture of the landscape changed until he could feel the spring of grass under his heel, and the water roaring under the bridge they crossed sprayed them. The father they went from the witch’s ship, the closer they drew to dome-shaped settlements on the other side of the river, the more real everything felt, and smelled, and tasted.

Looming at the top of the hill was a great statue. Prince Lotor. The clone took in the prince’s carved eyes, unsure of what this place was or why the witch brought them here. Stranger still was when he noticed the people peering out from the windows of their homes, and a brave few opened their doors to come investigate.

These people were not Galra.

They varied in skin and hair color, in height, in size, in the cut of their clothes, but they all had markings on their cheeks, most of them little crescents, some of them more elaborate. He saw a young girl with a pattern like a spider’s web on each side of her face, stretching down to her chin.

He stiffened as he felt the witch approach, her aura palpably cold as she passed each clone until she swept past him, pulling down her hood. Her white hair was limp and unnatural, but the clone could see the mark on her cheek.

“Hail and well met,” a young woman called uncertainly as she approached the rows of clones and their sentry guards. She visibly relaxed upon seeing the witch, though it was obvious they were strangers. “We saw your ship land. Are you from the other colony? I can’t say I recognize you. I am Galena.”

“I am Honerva,” the witch said in her low tones, “mother of Lotor.”

Galena and the rest of her people gasped, and fell to their knees.

“Mother of our savior,” the clone heard a man cry out from the ground, “we thought you were dead!”

“As did my son. But I have returned to continue his work in his absence.”

“Where is Prince Lotor, if I may ask?” Galena asked. She rose to her feet and brushed down the front of her skirt. “It has been many phoebs since he last visited us. And who are these men? They are not Altean, nor are they Galra.”

Haggar gestured to the waiting clones. “They are my personal guard, here for your protection. There is much to be done here and on the other colony.”

“And Prince Lotor?” an older woman asked again, her wrinkled face full of hope.

“My son is dead.”

The clone glanced around. No gasps or cries went through the crowd at this revelation. Instead he saw confusion, doubt.

“But,” Galena said, smiling, her eyes welling with tears, “but that cannot be.”

“My son is dead,” Haggar repeated softly. “Murdered. By the Paladins of Voltron.”

Groans shuddered through the crowd then, and some of the children began to cry. The clone looked again to the statue of the prince. His face was familiar, but not enough to jog the clone’s secondary memories, and he could not understand who exactly Prince Lotor was. He could not understand who the Alteans were, either, or why they cried out and wept for their slain savior.

He thought again of the infiltrator’s fight with the Red Paladin. Even when he shut his eyes and strained, trying to force the memories to come back, he could not envision the paladin’s face to determine if he was a murderer, what his reaction was when he discovered the infiltrator’s betrayal.

He winced as a shock of pain ripped through the back of his mind, recognizing it as the intrusion of another clone in his thoughts. He grabbed for the intrusion, trying to identify it, and caught a glimpse of his brother’s thoughts--it was one of the clones trying to fight against the witch’s control, trying to determine if he was too, only to turn tail upon realizing his mistake. Clone 00201 returned his attention to the weeping Alteans; the next time he thought of the Red Paladin, he would be prepared.

  
\-----  


  


The Alteans insisted on providing lodging and hospitality, and brought Haggar and her men to their grand central hall. There was shouting and commotion as the Alteans cleared out the space, pushing aside tables and chairs to clear room in the center of the hall. As one, the clones sat down. The witch gave no order, but there was a shift in the control she held over them, and Clone 00201 felt himself, strangely, relax. He couldn’t say he liked the feeling.

The witch sat among a group of older Alteans near the front of the hall, well away from them. If he concentrated he could hear their conversation by tapping into the memories of his brothers. Sorting through which ones were nearest to her would take time and energy that he decided he didn’t want to spend on eavesdropping, and as several different Alteans weaved among their large group with baskets of bread and carrying jugs and cups for drink, his attention was needed elsewhere.

“It is an honor to have you all here,” a young Altean man said as he placed a large round platter onto the floor by the clone. He sat on his knees and distributed the small plates piled with cheese and cuts of meats, pressing them into the clones’ laps when none of them made a move to reach out for them. “Eat, eat! You must be hungry from your journey. Cylar will bring you drinks soon.”

He sat back with a sigh at their collective silence and tore a loaf of bread apart. He was fair, with powdery violet hair pulled into a side ponytail that fell over one shoulder. The crescent marks on his cheeks were darker violet. Only his eyes were dark, standing out from behind his bangs as he looked over at Clone 00201 and caught him staring.

“What are your names? Where are you from?” he asked when he’d swallowed his bread. “You look Altean, but not. And you certainly aren’t Galra.”

One of the clones snorted. Clone 00201 glanced around immediately; even with the witch’s relaxed control, he was still determined to root out the dissidents in their midst. Though their faces were scarred in many distinctive ways, all of his brothers’ expressions were the same, uniformly passive, and he could not tell who the sound came from.

An Altean boy came by, holding a huge jug over his head. The Altean man reached out for it and set it on the floor. “Thank you, Cylar. Come join our new friends.”

The boy plopped down beside the man and stuffed a fistful of bread in his mouth, looking around at the clones somewhat fearfully.

“Don’t mind him. We’ve never been visited by outsiders other than Prince Lotor,” the man paused, as if he might choke up, then continued, “and you all look quite alike, for the most part. I would say you were brothers except there are so many of you!”

“We’re clones,” Clone 00201 said. “Haggar cloned us.”

“Haggar?” the Altean said, nose wrinkling in confusion.

“Honerva,” the clone corrected himself. He grabbed the handle of the jug and poured himself a tall glass of what smelled like fruit wine and looked like murky green oil. He drank a sip, and spat it out.

“It’s Nunville,” the Altean man laughed, unwinding the scarf draped over his shoulders to wipe up the spill. “The nectar of the gods!”

He scrubbed up the spill on the floor, then reached out to touch where it had spilled on the clone’s chest. Clone 00201 slapped his hand away. The sound of flesh against flesh was sharp, reminding him only of the infiltrator.

“My apologies,” the Altean said, unperturbed. He set his scarf on the floor between them and carried on. “I realize I haven’t introduced myself. I am Calistos. This is my brother Cylar. And what are your names?”

The clone said, “We are Shiro.”

**Author's Note:**

> I was really gunning to have at least the first chapter of this done in time for Kuron week, and luckily it coincided on the day where the prompt kind of matched. Hurrah for clone angst ~~and eventual clone sex huh who what~~
> 
> I was kind of disappointed that Shiro's time in the gladiator ring wasn't expanded on more, and Haggar evidently finding the Altean colony provided a good opportunity to explore more of that. Thanks for reading!


End file.
